Glenn Keller

We are living an illusion. We see the road ahead and we see the ground beneath and imagine, that it is firm and that it goes on forever.

But the horizon is a funhouse mirror and the ground is a knifes edge. Still, we walk along it and tell ourselves it’s solid. Until we’re pushed, a tiny tap really is all it takes, and we’re fighting for balance, our arms flailing around the air, looking for a handhold until we fall off one side or another.

“Your doctors office called”, “HR wants to see you”, “There’s a police officer at the door”.

And right then plans and hopes and dreams and the bullshit we tell ourselves all give way to the relentless math of the universe.

And the universe doesn’t care who we voted for, the universe doesn’t care what race we are the universe doesn’t care if we were rich or poor or good or evil or if we marched with King or cured polio. It doesn’t care about justice or injustice because it doesn’t care about us.

We, collectively, all of us together, are a cipher in time and space. Do you imagine that King Henry VIII is somewhere paying for beheading two of his wives? Do you imagine you will pay a price for that spider you whacked with a shoe? Laid side by side there is little to distinguish them.

We don’t exist. That’s the math. That’s the scale of the numbers. It’s going to fill in the missing side of the polynomial whether we like it or not but the truth is it doesn’t take much. We live on a planet that circles an un remarkable star that doesn’t even register within one arm of an unremarkable spiral galaxy among billions in space…space that continually confounds the physical laws we’ve made to comprehend it.

We are extraordinarily alone. In the cold. Walking our knifes edge. And all we have is each other and only for a nano second. And once we realize that…it’s always too late.